2014-2015

This course will critically survey the various ways in which philosophy curricula are developed and used in different educational contexts and for different age groups.  Considerable attention will be devoted to the growing movement in the U.S. for public educational programs in precollegiate philosophy.

A survey of the thought of some of the most important figures of this period, including Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

You and I might identify as all sorts of things: as an American, a woman, a teacher, a student, a hip hop enthusiast, a vegetarian, a knitter, a computer nerd, a chef, a caucasian, a runner, a news junkie, a bleeding heart liberal, a member of the tea party, a football fan, and so on. Call everything on that list a practical identity. Some practical identities are optional—we can choose or whether or not to adopt them—while others, such as gender, are such that the law requires us to adopt them. But in each of these cases, there is a question as to whether the relevant practical identity has a prescriptive or a descriptive flavor. When I tell you I’m a vegetarian, am I describing the way I am, or laying down a plan for how I’d like to be? Are vegetarians a special kind of person all of whom share a special, deep, common core, or are they just the set of people who happen to follow the convention of not eating meat? Does the way we talk about vegetarianism affect what it means to be a vegetarian—what vegetarians are or could be? This quarter, we will approach these questions through the specific case of gender identity. You might think it’s straightforward to say what it means to be a man: you’re a man just in case you have a Y chromosome, and a woman just in case you have two X chromosomes. But what about an intersex baby who is arbitrarily assigned a gender at birth? Or someone with Klinefelter syndrome, who according to the above definition would be both a man and a woman? What about someone who was born biologically female, underwent sex reassignment surgery as an adult, and now identifies as a man? What about someone who prefers not to adopt any gender identity? There is often a temptation to dismiss these examples as aberrant borderline cases. But the past few decades have seen an explosion of new gender categories, many of which may very well take center stage in our culture sooner than we think. If we decide to write them off, we need to tell some story about how our gender concepts license us to do so. If not, then we are faced with the interesting challenge of explaining what gender now is, in light of these developments.

I am, as a rule, able to say what I am thinking, intending, feeling, or doing without seeming to base what I say on observations of my own behavior. Both Ludwig Wittgenstein and (his student) Elizabeth Anscombe were deeply interested in this sort of non-observational self-awareness. In this course, we’ll be comparing and contrasting what Wittgenstein has to say about psychological self-ascription in his late writings with what Anscombe says about our knowledge of our own actions in Intention. (B)

This course is devoted to one of the most important philosophical books of the continental tradition, Levinas's Totality and Infinity. We will propose a systematic reading of Levinas's masterpiece in order to show the main aspects of Levinas's philosophical elaboration. The first aspect of our course will be to insist on the way Levinas takes position in the field of German and French phenomenology, in what consists exactly his technical and systematic critique of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre's conceptualities. We will, for that reason, propose to make Totality and Infinity in resonance with the most important sections of Husserl's Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and a Philosophical Phenomenology, Heidegger's Being and Time and Sartre's Being and Nothingness. This preliminary step will give us the conceptual means required in order to understand the exact philosophical position of Levinas towards the concept of society - that Levinas inherits directly from the French Sociological tradition (Durkheim in particular). Once such a background clarified it will become possible to understand Levinas's own elaboration towards the notion of society and for what reason the social experience coincides for him with a metaphysical experience - in other words in what sense Levinas can claim that the social relationship articulates what Descartes called the Idea of the Infinite. Such a second step will lead us to a last step which constitutes the ultimate demonstrative goal of our course: we will indeed try to show the necessity to overcome with Levinas the universalization of the notion of phenomenon coming from Husserl and Heidegger, to propose, in other words, a deflationist understanding of the notion of phenomenon. Such a deflationist understanding does not imply nevertheless the abandonment of the notion of phenomenon. On the contrary the metaphysics of society that we will propose, will lead us to think society as the fundamental presupposition from which the notion of phenomena coming from the Phenomenological tradition can find its logical meaning. What will be at stake is nothing else than the possibility of thinking anew the notion of Metaphysics in order to overcome the so-called "end of Metaphysics" proclaimed by Heidegger and Derrida.

In this class we will investigate what it is for a society to be just. In what sense are the members of a just society equal? What freedoms does a just society protect? Must a just society be a democracy? What economic arrangements are compatible with justice? In the second portion of the class we will consider one pressing injustice in our society in light of our previous philosophical conclusions. Possible candidates include, but are not limited to, racial inequality, economic inequality, and gender hierarchy. Here our goal will be to combine our philosophical theories with empirical evidence in order to identify, diagnose, and effectively respond to actual injustice. (A)

Graduate students planning to go on the job market in the fall of 2014. Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.

This course will be based on a direct confrontation between Sartre’s and Michel Henry’s phenomenological works. The main goal of this course will be to reintroduce the concept of immanence in a phenomenological sense beyond its critique by the philosophies of existence – of the so-called extatic dimension of human existence. The main goal of this course will be then to introduce two Sartre’s and Michel Henry’s phenomenological masterpieces (mainly Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego (la Transcendance de l’Ego) and Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation  (L’Essence de la manifestation)). Does the discovery of our intentional or existential openness to the world implies necessarily the renunciation to the notion of immanence or do we have to elaborate a phenomenological meaning for the concept of immanence in order to go further in the comprehension of the transcendent nature of our being? This will be the leading question of our seminar.

Linguists and philosophers have traditionally examined the role of language and thought as a medium for (mis)representing objective facts about the world we are living in. However, language is also an important tool for sharing subjective perspectives with others, and clearly not all thoughts are objective. Taking subjectivity as a sui generis phenomenon that does not reduce to another instance of descriptive talk and thought has repercussions that go beyond the traditional distinction between linguistics and philosophy: it impacts philosophical attempts to understand the nature of normative thoughts no less than the way linguists tend to think to about the nature of linguistic meaning. This is the first in a two-course sequence that addresses the exciting resulting challenges in a systematic manner, to be offered jointly by Professors Chris Kennedy and Malte Willer. The first course will be taught by Malte Willer and focus on foundational philosophical issues surrounding subjectivity in language and thought, including issues pertaining to normativity and general considerations about the shape a theory of natural language meaning must have to take the phenomenon of subjectivity seriously. The second course will be taught by Chris Kennedy in the Winter Quarter, 2015 and focus on linguistic issues surrounding subjectivity, including a rich variety of empirical questions and the impact that treating subjectivity as a sui generis phenomenon has for theoretical linguistics. Despite their slight differences in focus, both courses are interdisciplinary by design and will appeal to linguists and philosophers alike. Students may take either one of these courses for credit without taking the other for credit. The two-course seminar is also the launching event for a three-year interdisciplinary working group on the nature of subjectivity in language and thought, led by Chris Kennedy and Malte Willer and funded by the generous support of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. (II) 

An examination of the works of some of the most significant twentieth-century philosophers of Judaism. In the first part of the seminar we will examine the philosophical, theological, and ethical foundations of Modern Orthodox Judaism. The principal readings will be Joseph B. Soloveitchik's The Emergence of Ethical Man and Aharon Lichtenstein's By His Light. The second part of the seminar will focus on the post World War II emergence of a new philosophy and theology of Judaism in France. Primary readings will come from Emmanuel Lévinas, Léon Askénazi, Alexandre Safran, and Henri Meschonnic. Special attention will be given to the relation between philosophical argument and analysis, and theological conception and method.